I know your solitude and poise, the clenched fist of you, the blade: a glass shard in Garden’s green glowing world. And yet you’d never fit in mine. I wish I could have shown you where I’m from, hand in hand, the world I set out to build and to protect—I don’t think you would have liked it, but I want to see it reflected in your eyes. I wish I could have seen your braid, and I wish we could have left all those horror shows behind and found one together, for ourselves. That’s all I want now. A small place, a dog, green grass. To touch your hand. To run my fingers through your hair.
I don’t even know how that feels, and you’re—
I’m sorry. No. If we’re this far, if you’ve been this selfish—I did not mean that. I would have fought you forever. I would have wrestled you through time. I would have turned you, and been turned. I would do anything. I have done so much, and would have done as much again, and more. And yet here I am, a fool, writing you one last time, and here you are, a fool, reading me. We’re one, at least, in folly.
I hope you never read these words. I sicken to write them; I know how it will hurt you to reach this far. It is always too late to say what must be said. I cannot stop you now. I cannot save you. Love is what we have, against time and death, against all the powers ranged to crush us down. You gave me so much—a history, a future, a calm that lets me write these words though I’m breaking. I hope I’ve given you something in return—I think you would want me to know I have. And what we’ve done will stand, no matter how they weave the world against us. It’s done now, and forever.
What will I do, sky? Lake, what? Bluebird, iris, ultramarine, how can there be more when this is done? But it will never end—that’s the answer. There is always us.
Dearest, deepest Blue— At the end as at the start, and through all the in-betweens, I love you.
Red
* * *
Red arrives too late.
She should not come at all. Commandant will watch closely, for this is her triumph, long awaited. Red does not care.
She so rarely dreams, but did tonight, of players and an empty stage, of Blue crushing a poison berry between her teeth, and on waking, Red screamed, sweaty, death-mouthed, wide awake uncertain, as if a pane of glass within her soul had cracked. Terror seized her. She will not trust history or the report of spies.
Threads burn as you enter them. She cuts herself out of the air onto a shit-stinking muddy street in some upthread Albion, unwarmed by weak sun in a sky the color of whey. She wears trousers, a long coat, sheer gloves; to locals’ eyes she might as well be naked. Her passage makes waves. She will not be here long. Garden, panicked, slithers shoots upthread to catch her, chase her, kill her; Commandant, feeling this, sends her own agents in pursuit.
Fuck them.
She knows the shop, has observed it from afar, and barges through into a haze, cloying smells of drying fruit and herbs and heavy metals, every wall hung with bushes in some state of desiccation. The master alchemist consults a tear-streaked–widow client; they stare at Red in shock, in fear, and she locks them in place with a gesture of her gloves. Climbs the stairs, finds the prentice’s room. Knocks once, growls, slaps the door off its hinges.
And there she lies, sprawled upon the bed.
She might be asleep, wrapped in sunlight, but she is not. Blood has congealed already. Red wanted the poison to be painless, but Garden’s people—Blue’s—hold to life, and breaking that hold takes savagery. Blue fought to— Red can’t bear to think the word “die” at first, but that’s hypocrisy. This is her fault. The least she can do is own it. Start again:
Blue fought to die composed. Red only sees the pain because she knows to look for it and knows, too, how Blue looks when she’s hiding something.
The face, still. The jaw clenched, lips softly parted. The chest does not rise or fall. The eyelids parted, whites visible and shot through with blood.
One hand clasps a letter to her breast. On the letter, Red’s name. Her real name. Blue should not know it. But then, Blue never claimed not to know. A final confession. A final taunt.
The letter is sealed.
The sky should crack.
The world is hollow, its many braids chewing-gum snarls of nonsense. Let them die.
Red falls to her knees by the bed. She runs her hand through Blue’s hair and grips it between her fingers, and it does not feel the way she imagined, and that is the last sick joke. She clutches it and feels the skull, and the stillness, and lets her own sobs choke her into silence.
The sky changes color outside the window. Vines sprout from dead floorboards. Alarms are ringing in the ordered Garden and through the Agency’s cold halls. Agents exposed, endangered, dead. Monsters climb upthread to find her, kill her, save her.
She clutches Blue a
nd feels her cold and stiff. The world trembles, and the sky darkens. Garden may burn this whole strand, rather than let its infection descend.
But by some coward’s instinct, as the sky goes black and the screams begin outside, Red grabs the letter and runs.
She is fast and fierce, and unlike her pursuers she does not care if she never finds her way home again. She slips from thread to thread. Cities bloom and decay around her. Stars die. Continents shift. Everything starts, and everything fails.
She finds herself on a cliff at the world’s end. Mushroom clouds flower on the horizon as some remnant of a remnant of man wipes itself out.
Her hands shake as they raise the letter. The seal is a blot, a dot, an ending. It laughs at her, red as Red as red and hungry, and she wants teeth to crouch beneath, a cave that is a mouth where she can hide and be eaten and swallowed and gone. This is the last of it. Blue should have listened. She should have run. How could she die like this? How could she die at all?